Sparks of Invention

After lights-out, Seiryoku Academy pretended to sleep.
The courtyard lamps dimmed to a drowsy pulse. The corridors sank into hush. The wards over the windows shifted from showy gold to a low, steady blue that said: no more fireworks, go to bed.
The blue wasn’t just color—it was the academy’s mana grid throttling down, a soft neon heartbeat in the walls. Somewhere under the floor, converters clicked from day-cycle to night-cycle, and the air picked up the faint ozone tang of dormant runes cooling.

Renji waited until the last bell stopped echoing. Then he popped up beside my bunk like a jack-in-the-box.
“Field trip,” he whispered.
I nearly swung on him. “To where? The afterlife?”
“To the workshop.” His grin flashed in the dark. “Bring your notebook, protagonist.”

I groaned, rolled out of bed, and shoved my feet into shoes that still smelled like dust and training yard. My arms ached from Kaien’s drills, but my hands twitched like live wires. The sketch inside my notebook had kept me awake anyway: barrel, chamber, crystal slot. A shape I could almost feel when I closed my eyes.

We slipped into the hall. Renji moved like a cat burglar who had never seen a cat or a burglar but loved the idea. He had a keycard he definitely shouldn’t have. We ducked around prefect patrols, slid past a sleepy illusion ward that made the same broom closet appear three times in a row, and finally stood before a door with a handprint panel and the words: Applied Thaumaturgy – Authorized Access Only.
Tiny letters of permission code crawled under the glass like luminous insects, rune-script interlaced with circuit glyphs—school security pretending to be polite.

Renji smacked his palm to the glass.
The panel blinked. Thought about it. Sighed. Then unlocked.
A soft descant of wards briefly harmonized with the click—like the building clearing its throat to disapprove.

“Where did you get that?” I hissed.
He pushed his glasses up his nose. “From a friend who made a copy of a copy of a copy. Don’t worry. It only fails catastrophically one out of seven times.”
“That’s not comforting.”
He beamed. “Then don’t think about it.”

The workshop air hit me like home and chaos mixed together—hot metal, ink, old paper, a tang of mana residue baked into every surface. Benches sagged beneath parts that weren’t sure whether they were machines yet. Runes crawled across whiteboards like someone had tried to trap lightning in chalk. A coil of wire slept in the belly of a brass framework labeled ?? in thick black marker.
Crystal batteries dozed in charging cradles along one wall, their cores pulsing faintly like bottled storms. A couple of holo-schematics hovered in the corner, glitching between blueprint lines and runic overlays as if they couldn’t decide whether they were tech or spell. Cooling fans ticked, and somewhere a condensate line pinged like rain inside a pipe.

Renji threw his arms wide. “Welcome to my church.”
“You come here a lot?”
“Only when I need to breathe.”

He wasn’t kidding. His posture changed inside these walls. The mess didn’t faze him. He stepped over a box of capacitors like he’d put it there yesterday and found the light switch without looking.
The overhead rune-lamps woke in stages, washing the room with layered blue and violet. Threads of ward-light ran through the ceiling panels, mapping out the building’s bones.

“Okay,” he said, clapping once. “Show me.”
I opened the notebook to the page that had kept me awake. He leaned in so close his hair tickled the paper.
“A chamber here,” I said, tapping the sketch, “to hold a pre-charged crystal. It fires a standard projectile pattern—fireball, arc, whatever the crystal’s tuned for—through a channel that doesn’t need a caster to shape it. The runes do the shaping.”
“Ambient draw only?” he murmured.
“Minimal. The crystal should handle most of the work. I can’t supply mana.”
He nodded, eyes flicking. “Recoil compensation?”
“Vents along the barrel. Maybe a spiral baffle.” I frowned. “I don’t know if a gun even wants vents. The stories in Grandma’s books—” I stopped. “Different world.”
“Different rules, same physics,” Renji said softly. “Make the explosion go forward, not backward. We can do that.”
He said it so simply that for a moment I believed we really could.

He slapped the notebook shut. “Let’s build the ugly baby first.”
“Ugly…baby.”
“Mark Zero,” he said solemnly. “All great inventions begin hideous.”

We scavenged like thieves, moving through the workshop in a rhythm that felt suspiciously like joy. Renji knew where everything lived. He yanked a box of crystal housings off a shelf and dumped them onto a table. I sorted them by size, then by the purity of the glyph etching inside the glass. He found an old rune lattice for containment and a coil of silvery wire that hummed when my fingers brushed it.
Up close, the wire showed hair-thin veins of light swimming under the surface—mana-thread, the kind used in prosthetic conduits and high-end dueling masks. It sang against metal when it moved.
“That’s not going near my hands,” I said.
“It sings, Temo. Things that sing belong in weapons.”
“That’s a terrible rule.”
“It’s the best rule.”

We argued and assembled and argued while assembling. He etched containment sigils with a steady stylus hand; I measured clearances, shaved edges, test-fit the chamber again and again until it slid in without scraping. We raided a busted barrier projector for a shock mount. We repurposed a sighting rune from a dueling mask and glued it onto the frame with resin that smelled like someone weaponized pine trees.
The stylus hissed when it touched alloy, leaving hairline channels of light that cooled to a steady glow. When the resin set, it caught the rune’s glimmer and threw it back in tiny red sparks.

We worked until the quiet turned from comfortable to absolute.
At some point, the door whispered open.
I didn’t notice until a soft voice said, “…Should you be doing that?”
I looked up.
Hana stood in the doorway like she’d apologised to it for opening. Her hair was tucked behind one ear, her uniform sweater buttoned wrong. She clutched a paper bag and a thermos like they were armor.
A tiny charm glowed at the thermos lid—a low-grade warming rune, humming politely.

Renji didn’t even look up. “Yes,” he said. “We should always be doing this.”
Hana stepped inside, set the bag gently on the bench. “I brought…um…snacks. And tea.”
“You have perfect timing,” I said, and meant it.
She peeked at the mess. “Is that the…gun?”
“Mark Zero,” Renji said proudly.
“That…sounds scary.”
“It should.”
Hana’s eyes slid to me. “Be careful. Please.”
My throat went tight, which was ridiculous. I nodded. “We will.”

A shadow fell across the doorway. “You’re all going to detention,” Kenji announced, stepping in with the solemnity of a judge. “I can already hear the paperwork. ‘Dear parents, your child exploded the workshop while attempting to invent illegal weaponry.’”
His scarf’s edge pulsed with a faint ward-stitch as he moved, and the workshop’s rune-lamps threw an equation-shaped reflection across the glossy cover of the thin folder under his arm.
Renji pointed his stylus like a wand. “It’s not illegal if no one knows.”
“That’s…that’s actually the definition of illegal,” Kenji said. He sighed, then set a thin folder on the bench. “I brought you calculations anyway.”

“Traitor,” I told him without heat.
He pushed up his scarf. “I’m a realist. If you blow your hand off, who will ignore my tactical advice?”

I flipped the folder open. Kenji had printed out columns of numbers and plotted ugly graphs like love letters to probability. Shot discharge / recoil impulse / fall-off curve. Recharge window at ambient mana—low field. Failure modes. Half of it was Greek to me. The other half made my fingers itch even more.
The workshop’s rune-lamps washed the paper in violet-blue and the graphs threw back sharp, shadowy lines, like city streets seen from far above.

“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said briskly, and turned to Renji. “And you—no stacking containment lattices unless you want sympathetic resonance with—”
“—with the crystal’s anchor frequency. I read the paper.” Renji waggled his eyebrows. “You forget who you’re speaking to.”
“The man who superglued a sighting rune to a frame.”
“Necessary!”

I let their bickering become background hum and bent over the chamber. The crystal cradle clicked into place with a sound that felt like a promise. My thumb found the edge of the trigger housing—the barest pressure would set the mechanism whispering.
The etched channels along the frame held a faint, cool glow now, like streetlines of light waiting for traffic.

“Okay,” Renji said, suddenly serious. “No live shots yet. Dry cycle first.”
He wired a dummy stone into the chamber. The runes along the barrel whispered to life—thin lines of light like the veins in the training yard stones.
Hana flinched at the glow. “Is it supposed to do that?”
“Yes,” Renji and I said together. Kenji stared at us like we’d confessed a crime.

“Here we go,” Renji murmured. “Mark Zero, first heartbeat.”
He passed the frame to me.
The weight settled into my palm like it had always been meant to be there. Not perfect—a little nose-heavy, the grip too square—but something inside my chest went quiet. I didn’t have mana to feed the thing. I didn’t have spark or sigil. But as my fingers wrapped around the handle, the world rearranged itself into lines I understood: angles, balance, timing. I wasn’t asking a rune to love me. I was asking a machine to obey.

“Temo?” Hana whispered.
“I’m okay,” I said, and believed it.
I breathed. Sighted on a dead practice target someone had left propped against a back wall. The dummy crystal hummed. The rune lattice held steady. I squeezed the trigger—not to fire, just to feel the break and reset.
The mechanism clicked. Smooth. The sight rune flickered like a tiny unblinking eye, then steadied. Above us, a ward monitor on the ceiling flicked briefly from blue to amber and back, noting activity without tattling.

“Okay,” Renji said, a little breathless. “Now we test charge cycling. Then maybe…maybe a light spark. No discharge.”
“Define light,” Kenji said.
“No aether flash,” Renji said. “No projectile. Just…a cough. A baby sneeze.”
“Why are we giving the hypothetical gun a respiratory system?” Kenji muttered.
“Because it’s our baby,” Renji said.
Hana made a tiny sound like a giggle strangled by worry.

We moved slowly. Renji slotted a crystal with the faintest ember at its heart—an underpowered training stone that couldn’t burn a fingertip under normal conditions. He drew a containment bind around the bench in chalk, then added a second box around the first for luck.
The chalk lines woke with a moth-wing shimmer, reacting to the workshop’s background field; the two squares formed a tidy, glowing bracket around our bad idea.

“On my mark,” he said. “Three, two—”

The door swung open again.
We all froze like children who’d been caught drawing on the walls.

A lone figure leaned in the doorway, haloed by the corridor’s wardlight. Long coat. Scar along one knuckle. Eyes that had seen seventeen bad ideas and was ready for the eighteenth.
Kaien didn’t speak for a very long time.
Renji, to his credit, tried a smile. “Hi, Kaien-sensei.”

Kaien’s gaze took in the chalk binds, the humming rune lattice, the way I was holding the frame like it might decide to leave. His mouth didn’t twitch, not even once.
“I am not,” he said at last, “going to ask how you got in here.”
“That’s wise,” Kenji said faintly.

Kaien stepped closer. He didn’t reach for the weapon. He didn’t flinch at the glow. He only tilted his head slightly, like a swordsman studying a stance. The ember-thread stitching along his cuff caught the rune-light and pulsed, a heartbeat answering a heartbeat.
“What is it?”
I stood straighter. “A device to fire spell crystals without a caster. The runes in the frame shape the discharge.”
“Why?”

The question landed square in the center of my chest.
“Because I don’t have mana,” I said. “And I’m tired of that meaning I have nothing.”

Something passed over his face then—gone before I could name it. He looked at Renji. “Containment?”
“Triple-checked.”
“Fail path?”
“Out, forward, then down.”
Kaien nodded once. “You will not test a discharge in here.”
Renji deflated. “We were only going to make it sneeze.”
“No sneezing,” Kaien said. He turned to me. “You will test the mechanism only. Sight, trigger, dummy cycle. Then you will lock it up and go to bed.”
“Yes, sensei,” I said, throat tight.

“And Kuroganezu.”
I looked up.
He met my eyes squarely. “Tools are just tools. Elevate your feet, not your fear. Don’t forget what they’re for.”
He meant: don’t let the device make you lazy. He meant: the weapon isn’t you. He meant: keep training.
“Yes, sensei,” I said again, and this time my voice didn’t shake.

Kaien left without another word. The door closed softly behind him, leaving the humming room louder than before. The wall monitors ticked back to their quiet blue, like the building had decided to look away.

Renji exhaled like he’d been drowning. “Okay. Mechanism testing. That’s still science.”
We ran cycles until my hands learned the frame. Click, reset. Sight, breathe, steady. Kenji timed the rhythm and wrote numbers I didn’t understand. Hana refilled the chalk when it smudged and set cookies from her bag where we could reach without looking. Tiny, ordinary things that anchored the wild glow of the runes and the itch under my skin that wanted to see a real blast.
Each dry cycle made the etched channels along the barrel glow, then dim—like a neon sign testing letters one by one.

By the time the wardlights shifted toward midnight blue, Mark Zero felt less like an ugly baby and more like a promise we could keep.
We locked it in a case. Renji kissed the lid. Kenji rolled his eyes so hard he nearly fell over. Hana pressed her palms together like she was praying for it.
We slipped out into the hall again. The school’s hush swallowed us whole.
“Tomorrow,” Renji whispered, as if he were afraid to wake the building. “We’ll give it a cough.”
“No indoor sneezing,” Kenji said quickly.
Renji sighed. “Yes, mother.”
Hana smiled, small and real. “You’re all ridiculous.”

We split at the stairwell. Renji vanished down the east wing, humming to himself. Kenji marched toward the library, probably to compile a bibliography for a crime. Hana and I walked the last stretch in silence.
At the dorm corridor, she hesitated. “Temo?”
I stopped. “Yeah?”
Her fingers twisted in her sleeves. “When you…when you hold it, you look…calm.”
“That’s dangerous,” I said. “I should be more scared.”
She shook her head, hair falling like a curtain. “No. It’s…good. Like you finally found a voice that listens.” She grimaced immediately, like she’d said too much. “Sorry. That sounded silly.”
“It didn’t,” I said. “Thank you. For the tea. And the cookies. And the…not silly.”
She ducked her head. “Good night.”
“Night.”

I watched her go. My hands still buzzed as if the frame were there, even though it wasn’t. I flexed my fingers and felt phantom weight, a shape that hadn’t existed yesterday and somehow felt like it always had.

Back in my bunk, the ceiling looked closer than normal. I lay on my side until the ache in my shoulders settled into something warm. The world kept its magic locked in bloodlines and rules. Fine. We’d build something that listened to work instead. A different grammar, like I’d told Renji. A different way of speaking to fire and lightning that didn’t require being born in the right body.
Outside the window vent, the academy wards purred in their night-cycle—thin blue lines chasing each other along the eaves like a slow neon river. A distant transformer hummed where the campus grid met the city’s. For once, the sound didn’t make me feel excluded; it sounded like potential.

I fell asleep with my hands curled around nothing and dreamed of sparks that obeyed steel.

Morning made Seiryoku pretend it had never slept at all.
The courtyard swarmed with noise, uniforms crisp and creases immaculate. Runes on banners lit like sunrise. I moved through it with my notebook under my arm, every glance feeling sharper now. A rumor’s edge, a whisper’s heat—students smelled a story before breakfast and were busy sharpening it.
Holo-bulletins rippled above the main walk, capturing and replaying duel highlights and cafeteria gossip as translucent rune-threads. Someone scrawled “Outcasts Club?” in neon script that flickered, then got auto-moderated into “Study Group?”

“Did you hear? Workshop lights last night—”
“—someone said a discharge—”
“—Nah, prefects would’ve—”
“—Nullborn was there, right? He’s always there—”

I kept walking. If I reacted, they’d win.
Mana sensors embedded in the hall thresholds chirped quietly as gifted students passed; they stayed dumb for me. The silence felt both cruel and motivating.

In combat studies, the instructor blasted a row of targets into smoking charcoal to warm up her voice. “Partner drills,” she called cheerfully over the ringing. “Volunteers to demonstrate? Ah—Himura, thank you.”
The targets’ cores flickered with diagnostic glyphs while a HUD of orange runes floated over the debris, tallying heat, arc, spread—a clean, clinical measuring of chaos.

Ayaka stepped forward like a line in a textbook: posture, pride, precision. The air near her hand shimmered before the fire even lit. She looked like the word inevitable in a uniform.
Her crimson hair caught the ward-light with embered highlights, and her fiery red-orange eyes focused until the room felt narrower, hotter.

She and the instructor moved through a pattern so clean it cut the room in half. Flame spiraled, broke, tightened, leapt—Ayaka’s face didn’t change. Her eyes flicked once across the class. They passed over me like a blade’s shadow.
The AR overlay lagged a heartbeat behind her, rune-graphs scrambling to keep up with her control; numbers spiked, recalibrated, surrendered.

I pretended I didn’t feel it.

When the demonstration ended, the instructor clapped, and the class scattered into pairs. I found a corner where I could practice footwork without being tripped for it. Kaien’s voice sat in the back of my head like a metronome: Balance. Center. Again.
The ward-lines under the practice mats pulsed faintly with the room’s rhythm; each step surprised me by syncing to it.

“Nullborn!”
The voice bit. I turned.

An upperclassman I recognized from the previous day’s “assistants” strolled toward me, two friends flanking him like punctuation. He smiled without humor. “We weren’t done.”
Behind them, Ayaka adjusted her sleeve. She wasn’t looking at me. She didn’t need to. The room sharpened anyway.
The overhead rune-lamps chilled from gold to white, as if the system sensed escalation and logged it.

“Instructor said pairs,” I said, because apparently that was my line now.
“We are a pair,” he said sweetly. “We’re the pair that teaches you a lesson.”

He flicked his wrist. Lightning cracked across the floor, skipping like thrown stones. It wasn’t strong—a showy snap, more insult than attack—but it would have knocked me flat if it hit.
It didn’t.

I stepped into it instead of away. Boot, heel, pivot. The crack passed behind my calf close enough to raise hair. I kept moving. My feet went where my body trusted before my brain could argue. I was already inside his reach when the second snap came; it scorched air where my neck had been.
The ward-grid flashed and absorbed the spill, numbers crawling across a ceiling display: Arc: 14% // Spill: Captured.

A shout went up from somewhere I didn’t look. My world narrowed to balance, weight, angle. I slid, tapped his wrist with two fingers, and watched surprise blow his stance apart by itself.

“Enough,” Kaien said from nowhere.
He didn’t have to raise his voice. Even the rune hum beneath the floor seemed to bow its head.

“Mr. Sato,” Kaien added, without looking, “whatever odds you’re writing in your notebook, lower them.”
I didn’t need to turn to know Kenji was, in fact, scribbling furiously. “Noted,” he said faintly.

Kaien’s eyes flicked to me, then away. “Kuroganezu—feet. Not fear.”
I breathed. Stepped back. Reset. The upperclassman’s friends tugged at his sleeve, muttering something about the instructor watching. He sneered, but he sneered while retreating.
The overhead display quietly dimmed, like the room itself exhaled.

When the bell finally let us go, Renji slung an arm across my shoulders. “Two things,” he said brightly. “One: you didn’t die. Two: after lunch, we’re sneezing.”
“No indoor sneezing,” Kenji said automatically.
“Not indoors,” Renji agreed. “I found a culvert behind the south wall. Lovely acoustics. Very sneeze-friendly.”
Hana made a tiny noise like a worried bird. “Are you sure?”
“No,” Renji said. “That’s why it’ll be memorable.”

I should have said no. I should have remembered Kaien’s voice, his instructions, his almost-smile that felt rarer than mana in my blood. But the itch under my skin had turned to a pull. I needed to hear Mark Zero breathe.
“After lunch,” I said.

Hana exhaled like she’d been holding it since the dawn of time. Kenji pinched the bridge of his nose as if that would hold the day together. Renji beamed like someone had just told him the gods were taking suggestions.
We ate on the rooftop, the wind tugging at our sleeves. Hana’s humming drifted into the air and, without thinking, she shaped it—just a breath of sound magic, nothing more. The notes curled around us, soft as a hand on a fevered forehead, and the world felt a little steadier.
Below, Energis-7 woke fully—mana-signs flickering on towers, holo-ads sliding down glass like tame auroras.

“Ready?” Renji said.
“Ready,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” Kenji said, and followed us anyway.

We slipped along the south wall in the lull between bells. The culvert Renji had found yawned like a mouth in the stone—dry, shadowed, quiet. He chalked binds on the ground with the care of a priest and checked them twice. Kenji set a timer. Hana stood back, eyes wide, hands clasped tight.
Thin conduits hummed inside the culvert walls where campus infrastructure bled into the city’s; glyphs the size of thumbnails pulsed at intervals, measuring flow. The whole place felt like the border between intention and accident.

Renji pressed the case into my hands. Mark Zero waited inside, ugly and perfect.
“Just a cough,” he said softly. “No projectile. We see what the lattice does.”

I slotted the weakest crystal we had. The runes along the frame woke, faint as a heartbeat in a wrist. Sight, breathe, steady.
“On three,” Renji whispered. “One…two…”

I squeezed.
The world hiccuped.
A breath of light puffed from the barrel—a soft, startled glow, there and gone. The binds fluttered like paper in a breeze. The crystal’s ember dulled, then steadied.
The culvert’s sensors blipped to amber and back, uncertain whether to file a report.

We all exhaled at the same time.
Renji whooped and covered his mouth instantly. “It sneezed!”
Kenji stared at his timer, then at the frame. “Discharge negligible. Containment perfect. Recharge window…fast.” He swallowed. “Faster than I expected.”
Hana laughed in a tiny, breathless way—half relief, half awe. “It worked.”

I couldn’t feel my hands. Not from fear. From the something else that flooded them—warm and electric and quiet all at once. For a second, the ache from Kaien’s drills, the whispers in the halls, the word that followed me like a nailed-on name—they all receded.
Somewhere in the conduits, pressure adjusted with a soft clunk, like the city nodding once.

Mark Zero had answered me.
Not because I was born right. Because we asked and built and tried.

Renji bumped my shoulder with his. “Next time,” he whispered, eyes shining, “we let it cough louder.”
“Next time,” I said.

From the corner of my eye, beyond the culvert’s shadow, across the training yard’s far wall, a figure paused on a walkway and looked our way. Hair caught the light like a spark deciding to be a flame. Even at this distance, the tilt of her chin was unmistakable.
Ayaka’s crimson hair burned against the wardlight; her fiery eyes flicked once toward us, unreadable.

Ayaka turned away first.
I looked down at the frame in my hands and felt the story shift by a degree you only notice if you’re the one walking it.
“Feet, not fear,” I murmured.
Renji cocked his head. “Huh?”
“Nothing,” I said, and tucked Mark Zero back into its case as gently as if it were a living thing.

We erased the chalk. We walked back into the school day like we hadn’t been gone. The bells kept time. The banners shone. The wards hummed.
The city still belonged to the gifted.
But for the first time, I could hear a new sound under the song of their light—faint, stubborn, steady.
The click of a mechanism learning my hands.